Portal 2 Mod Adds Time-Travelling Legs

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An oversized revolver, a chunky pump-action shotgun, a bolt-action rifle, and seeing my own legs: the four things I most want to see in first-person games. Perhaps the first three wouldn’t fit too cleanly into Portal 2 but that fourth, yes, certainly! And joy of joys, a new mod has added that very feature, so I spent half an hour this morning running around staring at Chell’s toes as if the mod turned Valve’s puzzle-platformer into Kyphosis Simulator 2014.

I suppose technically the ‘main feature’ in the Thinking with Time Machine mod is a time machine which’ll have you creating time loops to solve puzzles with the aid of your past self, which is great and all but look, LEGS.

Thinking with Time Machine gives Chell a shiny little tablet with the magical power of creating and replaying time loops. Pressing R starts recording a loop, Q stops it, then F replays it. In these loops you’ll enlist your past twin to press buttons and move cubes and all that Portal jazz and sometimes, humbly, crouch down and give you a leg-up. At first the timetwin mostly opens doors and press buttons for you, but as puzzles progress you need to interact with their loop more.

It doesn’t appear to be the longest of mods, but the interactions get interesting and I’ll be returning later to finish up. For those lacking in some of the social niceties, it’s perhaps the closest we’ll get to playing Portal 2 co-op. Shamefully I’ve only played the first few co-op puzzles, which I should rectify.

You will of course need Portal 2 to play the mod but, as luck would have it, that’s on sale until Friday for £3.74, less than the price of a pint of reasonable ale in an East London pub.

First Person legs in games should be in the constitution.
Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3 just got an excellent mod adding the same thing. It’s one of those small things that are so obvious I can’t play without it again.

I finished this up last night and enjoyed it, although there were a few bugs (mainly crashes). The last few puzzles required some decent timing which adds a bit of urgency. I had a bit of trouble finding some of the portal walls (or rather realizing that there *were* portal walls and then smacking myself on the head because an impossible puzzle just became a lot easier) which made a few of the puzzles take longer than they should have, but other than that I thought it was a great addition to Portal 2. Definitely worth picking up at the low low price of free.

What’s the best shotgun in video games, anyway? The Flak Cannon and Painkiller shotgun would do but they’re not pump-action. Doom is probably the best in that regard, but I’ve got fond memories of how Fear’s shotgun hits enemies so hard you can breathe in the remains. Soldier of Fortune’s shotguns? Half-Life 2? Resident Evil 4? Call of Duty 2’s trenchgun? Hotline Miami’s shotgun? This deserves an essay-length mediation.

To put that less awkwardly, I also love it when your character’s body actually exists in first-person games; you can look down and see it, it casts shadows, accidentally kicks things over, etc. It should be standard.

I have a kind of ritual when I first load into a new first-person game: see what the FOV is like, back up against a sound source to see if the surround sound is working, and look down to see if my character has legs.